(By game size he means scope of the game and huge open world maps, not game install size)
Here’s hoping! Not only has it ruined a lot of once-smaller games, but it’s also largely responsible for ballooning development budgets, so let’s get that down to something sustainable.
One of the most egregious cases for me was Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. There was stuff for 40 hours aplenty, yet I spent most of those 40 hours killing the same goons over and over but with a different number over their heads, which meant I needed to spent more time in doing so.
If they had just aimed at making a memorable 30 or so hours, it would have been way better. This experience made me stop playing any Assassin’s whatever games.
Opposite to this, there was “Still Wakes the Deep”, which is a rather short but plentiful game.
I haven’t played Still Wakes the Deep, but Indika was that smaller game for me this year, and I’d highly recommend it.
“Indika, a nun looking to adjust to a monastic life. The twist in the tale comes in the form of her companion: she has a connection with the Devil himself”
Oh wow, with that summary count me in!
You have no idea. The opening moments of that game are surprising, even with that blurb and my recommendation, lol.
That game was soooo good!
Well, the clue is in the name I guess !
That said, I never got bored of odyssey. It was was just a beautiful place to hang out. The game engine was amazing. With NPCs going about their business etc.
I wish someone would just use that engine for more stuff .
I meant it that I really enjoyed the setting, the characters and some game mechanisms. I just hated this need of making the game seemingly endless by repetition, and I wished I didn’t have to be level X to be able to do Y, because the only way to level up was churning (for me that’s a no bueno).
Ha, you think this is to lower the budget or the price? Come on!
I know this is a cynical critique of capitalism, but even so, capitalists love lowering budgets and charging the same amount. Quite frankly, I’d happily pay the same or more to get a game with less bloat in a lot of cases.
God of war and Jedi have done great jobs of finally showing AAA they can make a smaller game and still have a great following. I’m so sick of giant Ubisoft worlds that have nothing to do in them. They’re boring.
I haven’t played the Jedi games, but it’s crazy that the new God of War games are somehow a demonstration of restraint, as that one from 2018 is probably twice as long as I would have liked, and Ragnarok is longer still, according to How Long to Beat.
Compare it to a game like AC Valhalla and you’ll think it’s smaller
There are quite a lot of ways of making an open world game with infinite replayability without requiring massive maps, but they’re not in the style AAA gaming has been going for in the past decade, they’re more things like Oxygen Not Included, Factorio, Minecraft or Battle Brothers were the game space is procedurally generated, the fun is in conquering the challenges of a map, and once you exhaust it you stop yet end up coming back months later and try a new game with a new map, from scratch, because it’s again fun and there’s no “I know this map” to spoil it.
The handmade game spaces with custom made “adventures” do manage to have better experiences than those games that rely on procedural generation and naturally emerging situations for providing gamers with experiences, but they’re mainly once of and rely on sheer size to remain entertaining for long.
Weird. In the West, we’ve been welcoming small(er) but interesting, unique or otherwise impactful games regardless of its size. Complaining about Warzone taking up 250GB on your hard drive and stuff. And that was 2020.
Not so much the size it takes up on your drive, he’s referring to the breadth and scope of the game itself.
You right, my thoughts trailed and I added that last bit even though it didn’t have to do with it, idk why.
I’m struggling to find space on my 500gb Deck and can relate to that
Infinite Wealth was deffo a bigger map and set thereof then its predecessors (Like a Dragon was also substantially larger, as was Lost Judgment in comparison to its predecessor), but it did absolute numbers, so I dunno about that.
I think it comes down more to if it feels appropriately sized and filled. Prior Yakuzas were bursting at the seems with shit to do everywhere in their smaller maps. Breath of the Wild had new and interesting shit going on everywhere too.
I’ve gotta disagree on BotW. I love Zelda games and the mechanics of that game were an amazing shift in the franchise. But that open world was so boring. The same like 4-5 enemies, even the harder variants didn’t have different movesets. TotK was even worse with the depths and a majority of sky islands being empty and devoid of content.
But the e gameplay is so fun it’s a lot easier to forgive them than say AC Odyssey.
I’ve been saying this since it released. Cool mechanics, but boring world and gameplay. I’m still a bit salty about the loss of real dungeons, nothing in BOTW or TOTK feel as memorable as the previous games.
2 of the 3 maps in infinite wealth were re-used anyways. I really like that they get good mileage from reusing assets they make.
So that’s why install size grew so much!
/s
Well then why did the newer LaD games have larger maps than Yakuza 0-6? I feel like Kamurocho was the perfect size for a game that’s always on foot, and while I enjoyed LaD 7, I think the map was too large and I had to rely on taxis much more than I did in older games. What they should’ve done is add the underground and interior stuff to Kamurocho instead of switching to a different map.
He was hired by Tencent after they launched LAD iirc, I remember some news but can’t tell when it happened in the post-covid era.
But I do find small, almost theatrical worldmaps or even sets of locations as a thing writers and designers can use to achieve greater effect. Y5 had Taiga Saejima’s town and mountain locations with vibes very different to what Haruka sees in Sotenboru, and it makes more sense and gives more space for gamedevs to customize these experiences than a gameworld where these are all interconnected walkable locations.
What’s the appeal of Yakuza? Is it a modern day Shenmue?
It’s bizarre, there are a ton of mini-games, combat is sometimes fun, storyline is yakuza melo-drama, dripping in themes around loyalty, honor and sacrifice.
It has a little bit of something for everyone.
9/10
I wish
Idk i think its random bullshittery if my memory serves me right
It’d be nice if JRPGs would go back to the old school overworld design like in Star Ocean 2. It’s a good compromise between sense of scale and interactivity with the world.
no fun in empty open world
They say people had fun in Daggerfall.
I mean I love open worlds with day/night cycles and other sorta living breathing feels. background views you can’t interact with though. meh.
Yakuza maps have never been particularly huge. Even in the most recent game, the new map is maybe on the scale of GTA III or Vice City. Still, they manage to pack 15-20 minigames into each game’s word map, some of which involve driving or riding around the map, plus the inevitable scavenger hunts and hidden collectibles.
The key is the “density”, activities and (player) engagements. I find it funny RGG is probably one of developers that can get away reusing assets so much that even can be traced back to ps2 assets on their newer games.
Honestly I don’t know if game map size has ever been THAT important, or a deal-breaker…
Too big of a map ultimately becomes a deal breaker for me because it will inevitably have too much empty space and get too boring and time consuming to play through.
Smaller more refined maps are better than larger maps where the team can’t sufficiently justify every single corner and make sure every inch truly is fully designed and makes sense.
I hope so. I want an era of gameplay first again…
I’d rejoice, but I’ll believe it when I see it happening consistently. I want smaller, denser, and richer worlds. Not giant, sprawling, and barren. It doesn’t add anything to a game for me if I have to walk or drive 10 minutes to get to my next location and it’s just empty in between.
What we’ll probably get (from Bethesda) is a combination of both. Smaller, barren, and procedurally generated
I don’t get why open worlds have to be so big. 95% of the time, they have next to nothing in them.
Well they gotta have the right balance, otherwise they’d end up be “open small town” instead of “open world”
To be able to say “our map is 100x100km!” The only games where it is worth it to have a huge map like that, is army simulators and RTS. Anything else could probably be better off with polish in some other place, rather than a huge map.
Maybe you can explain this to me… I’ve heard this countless times over the years, but I can’t figure out how it’s measured?
Is it based on if MC is taking average human strides? It seems like a ridiculous metric.
Games / game engines use units which correspond to size IRL. It’s needed to keep scale consistent. The characters are usually around 1.8m tall for instance
One of the notorious examples in PS3 gen era that’s now can’t be purchased at all. It’s a derpy offroad racing game in what looks like a procedurally generated world emptier than ash deserts in Morrowind.
